The ancient caravan city of Palmyra, also known as Tadmor in Arabic, is one such place. Stretching three kilometers through the Syrian Desert, its ruins tell enumerable stories, thousands of years in the making. The city was never fully abandoned, and so Palmyra is an archive beyond its buildings: one of people, culture, and conflict across time.

Palmyra prospered in antiquity as Romans and Parthians vied for dominance of the region. In the Byzantine and early Islamic era, Palmyra’s ancient temples were remade into churches and mosques, and, during the early-modern and colonial periods, foreign expeditions documented and secured Palmyrene artifacts for distant museum collections. Syrian and international teams of archaeologists reconstituted the ancient city through excavation and reconstruction in the 20th century.

Detail of two-part panorama featuring the Colonnade Street and the Temple of Bel in Palmyra. Albumen print by Louis Vignes, 1864/Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute.

Each of these phases in history reframed Palmyra, physically changing and conceptually altering the once-thriving metropolis.

And today, militants have caused irrevocable destruction to Palmyra’s monuments and people. Our own, heart-wrenching moment in Palmyra’s history has been met with a variety of responses, including digital reconstruction projects, museum exhibitions, academic conferences, and significant media coverage. Although sometimes uneven and the subject of criticism, these projects signify an impulse to resist the damage done during the current Syrian conflict by reimagining the site as it was before the destruction, or as it may be remade in a more hopeful post-war future.

I have been fortunate enough to have co-curated together with Frances Terpak the online exhibition The Legacy of Ancient Palmyra. This project is the first of its kind taken on by the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles. The focus of the exhibition is the remarkable material held by the GRI, including the earliest known photographs of Palmyra, taken by the French naval officer Louis Vignes in 1864, and a rare set of etchings made after on-site drawings by the French artist and architect Louis François Cassas in 1785.

Together these two collections offer a window into a seemingly distant time in Palmyra’s history, but one that was no less complex than our own. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the ruins of Palmyra and the village of Tadmor contained within its ancient walls were part of the Ottoman Empire. Palmyra was connected to the world through caravans consisting of hundreds of camels, as it had been for thousands of years. Expeditions to the site, like those of Cassas and Vignes, foreshadowed a deeper penetration of Western influence in the region as well as the beginnings of archaeological investigations.

Valley of the Tombs in Palmyra. Etching after Louis-François Cassas, ca. 1799/Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute.

Cassas’ prints were part of a larger survey that documented monuments from Istanbul to Cairo and part of a career that recorded and published views of classical ruins in Rome, Sicily, Greece, and Croatia. Although not known well today, Cassas was recognized by intellectual elites of his day, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, precisely because he had gone to Palmyra to see and draw these famed ruins.

The work itself, which can be considered the most comprehensive study of Palmyra before the 20th century, consists of close to 100 large-format etchings. These etchings are a collection of technical renderings, architectural plans, landscape views, and reconstructions of the magnificent buildings that have been intentionally demolished in recent years.

The painstaking detail in Cassas’ original drawings and the final prints display his desire to create a body of work that had superb aesthetic value. And by design, his imaginative depictions of the site also became blueprints for European artists to use in works of architecture, painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts.

View of the interior courtyard of the Temple of Bel showing the mudbrick homes in the foreground. Albumen print by Louis Vignes, 1864/Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute.

Neoclassical Europe had already had a taste of Palmyrene art from the earlier and more famous British expedition of Robert Wood and James Dawkins, whose monumental book The Ruins of Palmyra, Otherwise, Tedmor in the Desert (1753) was often cited as a source for architectural inspiration in 18th-century England. For example, the now-destroyed coffered ceiling of the Temple of Bel, which was depicted in the Wood and Dawkins publication, was replicated in the interiors of at least four prominent buildings designed by Robert Adam and others.

Cassas’s goal was to give this audience more material by providing lavish depictions of a style that became to be known as “Roman Baroque.” Although the term is generally not favored by art historians today, “Roman Baroque” suggests what Cassas and his audience found so powerful in Palmyra’s art and architecture. The colossal scale and opulent decorations of the Roman-era buildings in the great cities of the Eastern Mediterranean rivaled some of the best examples of classical architecture found in the West, even in Rome.

Palmyra’s architecture exemplified this concept, and, combined with its location “lost” in the desert, magnified its appeal. Embroiled in the struggles of the French Revolution, thinkers in Cassas’ time readily connected the perceived abandonment and decline of Palmyra as a cautionary tale to the possible destruction of their own civilization.

Imaginary view of Tetrapylon. Etching after Louis-François Cassas, ca. 1799/Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute.

Nearly 80 years after Cassas’ travels to Syria, Louis Vignes brought his camera to Palmyra and moved its ancient monuments into the modern era. To our eyes, Vignes’ images may appear nostalgic, and in light of current events, ghostly, as visages of a past no longer present. But to a 19th-century viewer, they would have been seen as concrete evidence, either validating or refuting the embellishments of earlier accounts. In contrast to the timeless and almost dream-like qualities of Cassas’ images, Vignes grounded Palmyra in a photographic immediacy that places the viewer in the monument.

This 1864 expedition to Palmyra was an offshoot of a larger geological and cultural survey of the Dead Sea region that was sponsored and led by Honoré Théodore Paul Joseph d’Abert, duc de Luynes, a French nobleman with a passion for archaeology, science, biblical history, and technology. Vignes, a ship’s captain hired for the mission because of his knowledge of the regions’ ports, had only briefly trained in photography before embarking on this journey.

The regional survey was meant to be scientific and comprehensive. Along with photographing classical, biblical, and crusader sites, the expedition team documented and mapped the sources of rivers described in the Bible, and collected core samples from the Dead Sea and specimens of its marine life. The expedition brought two small collapsible metal boats across the desert to be reassembled and used for research as needed.

The images produced by Cassas and Vignes are squarely set inside a colonial or orientalist vision of Palmyra, mostly concerned with its classical past. They were made in an interventionist period which deserves unsympathetic criticism for the lasting economic and political effects it caused in the region.

View of Palmyra from Qalaat Shirkuh before the destruction of its major monuments by ISIS. Photo by Judith McKenzie/Manar al-Athar, 2010.

Alongside and inseparable from this fraught history are the beginnings of modern scholarship on Palmyra and around the world. Many scholars from many countries have dedicated their professional careers to researching Palmyra. Through their efforts we know that Palmyra, throughout much of its history, was home to changing multi-ethnic and religiously diverse societies. Modern archaeology has reframed the city in our own time by excavation and decipherment of inscriptions. These images of daily life through the ages, culled together from decades of work by scholars, replace the earlier Western concept of Palmyra as a landscape of romanticized ruins belonging to a lost civilization.

Appallingly, Syrian archaeologists, workers, and others with knowledge of this and other sites in the war-torn country have been targeted and killed in recent years. In some reports, these atrocities have occurred when attempts were made to protect the sites from ISIS looters, who have been systematically seizing and selling antiquities to fund their activities.

Pursuing knowledge about Palmyra cannot undo the damage done. But it can offer new narratives that promote the value and importance of cultural heritage. From a nexus of trade in antiquity to a modern tourist destination, people from diverse backgrounds flocked to Palmyra. Continued engagement with the place, digitally if not physically, will help future generations reframe Palmyra once again.

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I often marvel at how a schlocky choice of leisure reading began a lifetime of involvement with Mexico. I also marvel at the irony of being seduced by such fantastical theories, when my lifetime connection to Mexico became focused on everyday life—that of the Aztecs I was studying, as well as my own family’s.

I married an archaeologist, and our daughters April and Heather spent much of their childhood in Mexico. My wife Cindy and I decided that Cuernavaca, about a two-hour drive south of Mexico City, would be a good base for fieldwork. It’s a modern city with good schools and hospitals. The fact that it was a gorgeous city (“La ciudad de la eterna primavera,” or “city of eternal springtime”) didn’t hurt. Most important, there were numerous Aztec-period peasant villages in the area I could excavate.

Wall foundations of Aztec peasant houses the author excavated at the site of Capilco.

 
My choice puzzled many colleagues. Archaeology in Mexico has traditionally focused on the big ruins—Teotihuacan, Monte Albán, Chichen Itza. “Aztecs” equal pyramids and palaces to most people. Indeed, one such site—Teopanzolco—was literally in the middle of Cuernavaca. But I wanted to figure out what life was like for Aztec farmers and other commoners. Most written sources on Aztec history—texts by Spanish friars and native historians—deal exclusively with kings and nobles, the one percent of Aztec society. What about the 99 percent? Instead of searching for pyramids and tombs, I sought out the crumbled remains of small adobe houses. I excavated trash heaps of broken cooking pots and kitchen knives. (We archaeologists who study ancient households are obsessed with trash, because it is our window into daily life).

However boring or ordinary it seems, my unorthodox focus on villages and kitchen trash yielded big results. It contradicted some longstanding assumptions, including the notion that average Aztecs, oppressed by nobles, lived in abject poverty and had few choices in life. The people who lived in these sites were fairly well off. They had many imported items in their homes, and they owned goods in the latest styles of Aztec society.

Broken flutes from domestic trash piles. Every house had musical instruments.

 
The Aztec communities that we excavated—often digging in people’s backyards—had been prosperous and successful, something I hadn’t anticipated. Indeed, these ancient farmers devised an economy based on local resources, one that operated at a small scale yet linked to broader realms through trade and exchange of knowledge. That is, the Aztecs had discovered the sustainability principles of “deep economy” long before Bill McKibben wrote a book about it. A house-by-house census written in the Aztec language (Nahuatl) provided the final clue to their success: These farmers belonged to a kind of community council called a calpolli, which gave them freedom to farm and live as they wished, without kings and nobles bossing them around.

Meanwhile, my family’s everyday life was also enriched by the Aztecs. We adopted Mexico as a second home. We would pile our tools, gear, and April and Heather into the car every year for the drive from Arizona to Cuernavaca. Sometimes we went for a semester or a year; we almost always spent the summer. Cindy and I did fieldwork or studied artifacts in the lab, and the girls went to school or played with friends in the neighborhood.

The author’s daughter Heather and her neighborhood pals heading to day camp in the author’s truck.

 
We always boiled water for drinking, cooking, washing fresh vegetables, and brushing teeth. Boiling water was a big deal in our daily routine, taking up hours of stove time every day. But although we lectured the girls about clean water and contamination, April and Heather both went through a period of nearly constant intestinal ailments—from simple diarrhea to amoebic dysentery. We became close to our neighborhood pediatrician. I recall carrying 5-year-old Heather down the street to the doctor because she was too sick and dehydrated to walk. Many years later, after they were grown, the girls made a devastating confession that clarified a lot: “We used to drink water from the garden hose with our friends.” You know, because they weren’t supposed to do so.

While in Mexico, our girls experienced extremes of poverty and wealth they didn’t see in our middle-class American life. The laborers in our excavations were campesinos or farmers from a nearby village. Cindy and I got to know families in one village quite well, and we became compadres with several couples: We formed very close, if formal, social bonds with parents and sponsored their children, either in religious sacraments (baptism or confirmation) or in more secular activities (graduation from sixth grade). We bought the bride’s dress for one wedding, we paid for the band at another. April and Heather had many friends there and witnessed humble rural life first-hand—sleeping in an adobe house with a dirt floor, for example, and being awakened in the morning by pigs trying to push the door in.

Mexico’s affluent also inhabited a world we’d never before experienced. Once our girls were old enough, we enrolled them in a private school in Cuernavaca, the Instituto Oxford. The tuition put a big dent in our income, and I think we may have been the poorest family at the school. April and Heather let us know that we were the only ones at the school without servants. The girls’ friends from school lived in mansions nestled behind security gates and graced with pools and tennis courts. Maids cleaned up after sleepover parties. Their parents spoke both Spanish and English and regularly flew to Texas to shop.

But regardless of class divides, Mexico warmly embraced my family, and provided all of us with a wealth of experiences, in addition to a rich culture and a second language. I’m eternally grateful I picked up that book so many years ago, in search of Atlantis. Fruitful quests, and inspiration, can often be sparked by the most seemingly inconsequential of choices. Our time in Mexico taught us that both archaeology and family benefitted greatly from a focus on everyday surprises.

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